Just privatise the NHS

[user1237865]

Totally prepared to be told IABU but I've just got to the point where I think the NHS is so far gone it should be privatised.

Totally outing so I've Name changed. In NI we have 2 private hospitals but they don't do emergency's, they don't do ante natal care. Really they only provide you with an appointment with a consultant who will then decide in treatment which in most cases will happen on the NHS. If it's something like cataracts they'll do it but the private hospitals here don't do anything major. Perhaps the rest of the UK is the same. I'm not sure.

Today DSis was sent to A&E by the GP. DM and her have now been waiting 7 hours to be seen. While waiting another man collapsed and died in front of them. I think this is beyond ridiculous how can they let this happen?! If people were seen in a decent time frame this would be less likely.

FIL has terminal cancer again nowhere to treat him when he gets recurring sepsis so most times he sits on a chair (around ever 2 months) for 36 hours getting an IV in A&E before he's finally gets moved to a ward.

I paid for private ante natal care each time I was pregnant. It did give me appointments every 3 weeks and scans with a consultant but when it came to giving birth it was a time when the consultant was working a shift for the NHS thus using their resources and beds. Yes the care was probably therefore cheaper than had I been paying for my stay in hospital too but it isn't an option here.

The whole things a complete joke. Those willing to pay/ have insurance are still stuck blocking the NHS which in my opinion should be there for those that can't afford their own treatment or can't get insurance through their job.

Surely if a lot of it was private, pay would be better, meaning more people choosing it as a career (and not leaving) meaning people actually get proper care! Though so much of what I think could be wrong as I don't understand it all fully.

Which country out of interest? I've used healthcare in three Euro countries, have a child resident in a fourth, a sibling in a fifth. I've never seen basic healthcare in a regulated environment get close to 1000 per month (nor was it that much in the US).

Has privatisation helped on the rail system? or any other system that wasn't previously privatised??

I can only assume you have no memory of the deep joy which wasn't British Rail, British Telecom or any of the other nationalised services. The reason Thatcher was able to get initial traction for privatisation with the public was because the level of service and attitudes to customers was shockingly bad in many cases.

The management of those privatisations was financially incompetent with large scale undervaluing of assets but the public support came from the piss poor and jobsworth service many people experienced - when you are not getting a decent service you have little to lose by changing it.

@XingMing Total spending on NHS is 136 billion, against Govt expenditure of 1.2 trillion.
Nothing like half of all spending.

There are 171 billionaires in the UK and 2.4m millionaires... hardly a tiny amount.
Incredible that anyone defends tax evasion and avoidance for the wealthy, which perhaps they ve been rather good at since their numbers have increased from 1.5m in 2012.

The old chestnut of "They'll go elsewhere..." well according to you they don't matter, so why care? and secondly, where would they go? every western country is looking to find new ways to increase tax take plus closing loopholes, such as exist in property and investments just puts us on par with most other countries.

NHS spending for the first ten years of the tory govt, pretty much stood still, much of the nhs got a 0.9% real terms increase, despite medical inflation running at over 5%.
They also removed the bursary which gave all AHPs free tuition, one reason we've staff shortages.

How much are rail fares compared to most of Europe?
Water companies? has that gone well? record pollution into our rivers and seas.
Energy privatisation? not a stunning success story, how many have gone bust recently?

I suspect public support came from the promise of some free cash and being fooled into thinking they could be part of the share owning elite.

Having worked in Telecoms, both with the part privatised BT and fully privatised telco's i can assure you there is little efficient about them, what there is is huge over charging and exploitation of the workforce... BT being one of the worst with its use of zero hours contractors.

UK is one of the worst performing countries in europe for full fibre rollout.

The NHS is amazing and you'd be paying thousands if it was private for the kind of operations we have.

It's not perfect but we should be damn grateful for it.

Just fuck off.

/longer response. Perhaps a continental style mixed system but NOT bloody privatisation. Money, selfishness and privilege drip off op.

The NHS is amazing and you'd be paying thousands if it was private for the kind of operations we have.
It's not perfect but we should be damn grateful for it

Why "grateful"? My PAYE and NI alone has averaged about £45k pa for the last 10 years. DH pays even more. For that our family got:

• care for autistic DS that was so piss poor the ombudsman is investigating
• undiagnosed cancer following classic red flag symptoms that the GP couldn't be arsed to investigate, despite repeated telephone calls for what they euphemistically call consultations. (In reality just "let me help you work out how to piss off somewhere else").
• aforementioned relative with cancer left in AMU for 5 days.
• a smashed up wrist that was left on an op waiting list for so long (because "non-urgent") that the bones started to fuse, leaving the person with limited movement and constant pain.

It may be many things, but the standard of care is now so poor that nobody should accept it. I am not in favour of a US-style fully private system, but if you've experienced the continental co-pay systems, you'd have to be lobotomized to prefer the NHS.

I don't need to suspect, I remember it. Most of the privatisations had no offers of free cash and even that wasn't on the table when the privatisations were mooted. The service levels were shocking. Employment was a closed shop and a complete "jobs for the boys" (and usually white boys). People seem to forget the colour bars and sex bars maintained by some unions.

The privatisations were mismanaged - vast assets significantly undervalued and lost for good. The Electricity boards in every city and the Water boards were huge land owners - that is gone for good. Renationalising all that would be near impossible and cost a fortune. Proper regulation on the other hand has never been implemented and would be the first line to improve them and bring more of the money back into services.

I've worked with Telecoms as well. I agree its a mess in the UK but again zero hours contracts were not invented by BT - that is a matter for government regulation. Incidentally - I've also worked with telcos outside of the UK and they are equally fragmented and messy. What helps is where there is a strong regulatory environment around employment and services - that is what has always been missing in the UK.

@C8H10N4O2 No argument from me on the lack of regulation and reform in many industries was long over due but why do we always have to go to the other extreme?

Regulation doesn't seem to be a UK strong point.. so there is no reason to believe privatisation of the NHS would lead to any better outcomes that what we've seen in water or trains etc.

My DD deals with many privatised areas of healthcare, mostly in getting patients to leave hospital and live independently, the profiteering is rife... for example: Charging a separate delivery charge for each item ordered from the same company and delivered in the same van.

Thats what private companies do, make profit, not a little profit but the maximum they can extract & they'd do the same with the NHS.

Its worth noting that the massive land sales which inflated the coffers of the nationalised industries did not start with privatisation. The first rafts happened under Tony Benn when it was still nationalised and he was responsible for energy.

Historically the extensive land ownership came from providing housing for workers which was largely no longer needed. For utilities these parcels of land and housing stock were in cities and mini pots of gold. There was a drive from the moderates in his own party to transfer these the the old housing trusts (the Peabody types) for social and semi social housing. The other view was that all housing would come from council and state provision and so the land was just sold off cheap. That cost the country billions in lost value and the value was accrued by the land grabbers.

The privatisations just continued what Benn had started.

Spending billions of tax payers money on nationalisation will solve nothing but give us a huge debt. Privatisation in itself solves nothing but nor does nationalisation. Regulation is the only way to make either model work.

In competition to provide services yes companies want to make money. GPs have always been private business in competition - is that a failed model?

For any business to make money they have to provide the service, including customer service and they need to innovate and keep costs down. That is what tends to be missing where there is no competition. There is absolutely no concept of patient time being of any importance or value in our health care system and it costs patients money. This nonsense that the NHS is free at the point of care is largely a lefty liberal bit of complacence in a system which needs sharp elbows to get anything.

Care is not free if you can't afford or get a day out of your zero hours contract to sit around all day waiting for an appointment.

I’m genuinely confused about how turning nhs into a business that wants to make a profit would assist it at all? How would this improve patient care or the current staffing crisis and the impact that has on patient care?

Care is not free if you can't afford or get a day out of your zero hours contract to sit around all day waiting for an appointment

this.

also im sick of hearing that we should be grateful for the NHS, like it's some amazing favour the government / staff / whoever are doing us all.
We pay for the NHS through our taxes and if people saw it as a service they are paying for and not just something to be 'grateful' for like a present, then maybe we would expect better service and not accept the crap that is currently the case.

My 6 year old DC was screaming in pain last week with an obvious ear infection. My gp surgery has the online contact form for appointments, you log the problem and someone will contact you before 7pm the following day by phone to make an appointment. If you miss the call, tough luck start again. I managed to get hold of them on the phone (after being on hold for 45 minutes so that alone cost me an hours pay) only to be told they don't do same day appointments AT ALL. In the old days id have gone in to make the appointment to save being on hokd for hours but that is no longer allowed since covid.
So we had to take DC to urgent care. Waited for hours, to be told sorry we can't see the eardrum as there is wax but the NHS don't remove the wax. Either take them to specsavers to have the wax removed privately or come back in a week if it's not better or they develop a fever over a certain temp. Until one of those things happen no antibiotics.

So I had to take them to a private place pay £70 to have the wax removed, where they could see a serious middle ear infection that was so bad it was causing temporary deafness in that ear. I could now either take them back to Urgent Care for another 3 or so hour wait or pay for a private antibiotics prescription. I paid because luckily I could afford to and the cost was less than losing another 3 hours pay, but all in that cost me £96 plus almost a full day's pay.

So frankly that is neither 'free at the point of use' or something to be grateful for. It was literally a waste of time and money and a lot of unnecessary pain and stress for a young child.

Good customer/patients services actually cut costs. The admin overhead of mismanagement of records and appointments is very significant on the NHS, let alone all the unmeasured patient time lost.

C8 thanks for explaining. I genuinely didn’t know but I see plenty of wastage in nhs ( I have detailed in another post on NHS pay rise) so if that would actually be overhauled that would be great.

Profits have to be paid for. It’s been proven over and over again that privatisation doesn’t improve services.

There are no NHS nursing homes in Northern Ireland - they are all private.

One of the clinics in Belfast provides what it calls emergency care.

There have been serious failures of antenatal and birth care in the independent sector which is likely a factor as to why its not provided anymore (I didn’t know this as I am
way past that phase).

Somewhere as small as NI doesn’t have the throughput of patients with complex conditions in the private sector which is why they tend to do fairly basic high volume things (hips, cataracts etc).

The Conservative party have been chronically underfunding the NHS precisely so that they can turn around and say 'this isn't working, let's privatise it'.

Sadly, OP, you have fallen hook, line, and sinker for it.

I don't think it's unreasonable to have fallen for it, but I do think it's unreasonable to still think privatising healthcare is a good idea once you've thought about it properly.

Also all of this.

Two possibilities here.

People who vote Tory are either stupid, or they are bastards.

ie they either don't understand the implications, or do understand and don't care.

And yet somehow, most of Europe manages to provide better outcomes per Euro for its population on exactly that model.

Privatisation doesn't automatically mean better service but in a regulated environment you can ensure it does. The NHS has always been largely privatised because that is what doctors demanded - its not a "new Tory trick". We just pretend its not private and end up with the worst of both worlds.

So we had to take DC to urgent care. Waited for hours, to be told sorry we can't see the eardrum as there is wax but the NHS don't remove the wax. Either take them to specsavers to have the wax removed privately or come back in a week if it's not better or they develop a fever over a certain temp. Until one of those things happen no antibiotics.

That’s weird! I rang the audiologists for an appointment to remove wax, as I had hearing loss, tinnitus and pressure in one ear. The audiology practice told me, I might have an infection and/or perforated eardrum - and they couldn’t prescribe antibiotics, so I had to go see my GP! The GP couldn’t see my eardrum for the wax, but prescribed antibiotics! They didn’t work, but the audiologist agreed then to micro suction my ears (as both were full of wax)! That cured the hearing loss, tinnitus and pressure!

The complete opposite of what you were told!

The admin overhead of mismanagement of records and appointments is very significant on the NHS, let alone all the unmeasured patient time lost.

Yes, I’ve been given two appointments at the same clinic next week, one with the consultant and one with the clinical specialist nurse (who I normally see) for a set of injections, which can only be given once every 3 months! I’ve got to cancel the consultant appointment!

There’s a massive population and sadly there does seem to be an attitude that comes across as ‘i can do what I want and treat my body as I like’ because it’s someone else’s job to fix me. Community care is under extreme pressure and this is in part because of social changes that mean that family no longer has the structure in place to support elderly relatives, the health and social care system is left to pick up the pieces. Privatisation still leaves the same number of patients waiting to be seen. People are heading straight to A&E knowing they could see a GP (I know this is very hard at the moment) but choose to go to the very place that they probably shouldn’t be. It’s lots of issues that could be helped by everyone, funding , staff and patients alike.

Has anyone actually worked out the funding needed?
I think that they have and it is readily ignored every year and we end up in a place where the gap is massive.
funnily enough the same thing happened in the run up to 1997 🤨

If GPs didn't make it so difficult to make a face to face appointment, less people would go to A&E.